What Is It All Worth?
by Stuch
Summary: Eventually all there will be left of the outbreak and Infected's scourge across the world will be the stories of those who persevere.
1. Chapter 1

It wasn't the End as we might have expected; more of a new, depressing beginning. War, we no doubt assumed, would steal the wind from humanity's sail and it would have been over for the majority in the blink of a newly formed star. But that was not how it happened and nature had a far more inventive plan for how to solve the ever-growing problem of the human race.

The Infected killed everyone in the early days, to varying degrees. Many were quick deaths, horrific for any who bore witness, though not as quick as the victim might have wished - torn to bloody chunks by recently turned family, friends and strangers. Many more were given a terminal gift, floating on the air, tickling the throat or passed on through tooth and claw, that crept throughout your body and slowly shifted you from control of yourself. Cancerous and cruel, pressing on the brain like a tumor, tip-toeing up the stem and replacing as it went. Seizing and conquering, neuron by neuron, until one day you awoke and moved without willing it yourself.

And the rest? The witnesses and survivors, those rats who were able to turn and watch the bow slip below the surface. Continuing to live came at a price and they all had something taken. A portion of their selves ripped so violently that they awoke screaming at the memory. Or arguably worse, secreted from them or chipped away over time, some small shred of who you were. Nothing more than a pinhole from where the rest of you leaked, not realising until you rummaged through the pockets of a corpse for the first time and guessed at the size of his boots. Feeling your own eyes watching you, shaking your head.

Perhaps destroying ourselves might have been preferable. Twenty years of ever dwindling population had a way of wearing down the spirit and resolve until the instinct of survival took precedent. Life at once ever more difficult and yet gloriously simplified. Fearful of everyone you met and screaming internally at the loneliness. A life that hardened you, chewed up and spat out different somehow. Quieter and living almost entirely in your own mind, retreating to those hidden thoughts. Memories of a life once lived and of all the lives wasted. Locked tight inside, one last ember in the ash.

And to those who could see it - often the middle-aged who led the most carefree lives those twenty years before - memories were only ever a few layers of dust down or the ripping back of the ever-present foliage. Posters and billboards found when scavenging, old packaging and advertising, smiling faces and happier times. As though a soda could reset all of the pain in the world. Trying to remember when you last saw a smile like that or even when you smiled like that, no worries at all. Laughing when you realise nobody ever grinned like that in real life, all teeth, instead focus on what soda tasted like but it's as lost and fuzzy as a loved one's face.

Or the girl in the poster reminds you of something else, breathless late-teenage years when all you had to fear breaking down a door was a furious father. Her face lost like all the others over time, replaced by the girl with the soda can. Can't forget how nervous you were, so excited that you forgot to breathe until the burning sensation in your chest. It wasn't the sex that you missed, if anything there was more of that after the infection with the loss of most other leisure activities, it was the closeness and trust. A time when it wasn't so frantic and desperate, when you didn't spend the whole act worrying about whether it was just a rouse to steal your precious tinned fruit.

There were still moments of levity speckled throughout the horror and despair, brightness could peak in sometimes and take you away from it all for a spell. Out in the wilds, a pond or lake could catch the sun just right and everything would just melt from you, the aching feet or ubiquitous hunger. Forget why you had a rifle in your hand and so few bullets you named them like children, kissed them before tucking them into the chamber. Debate with yourself if the downtime was worth the risk.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you could strip off and take a dip without incident, leave your weapon lying around and it would be there when come back. But you never did take that plunge because every instance felt as though it were that other one percent and your luck was finally about to run out. The Runner could come thrashing into the water, return to find a Clicker standing on your shirt or worst of all, "Hey buddy! This your rifle? Mine now." So you would ignore the opportunity and move on, on and on, until that night when you found shelter in the burnt out shell of a car you wished you had at least taken the boots off and gotten your feet wet. Promising yourself that next time you would, but knowing it was a lie.

Maybe you found someone to trust, maybe even more than one with which an initial, shaky alliance was built on a foundation of mutual suspicion. Slept with one eye open on the others for weeks, held back on your level of supplies and checked your pack every time you thought the others were doing the same. The distrust ebbed over time with an occasional peak, your own fantasies of taking advantage projected onto them. You looked them over, guessed the age of their kit and stared so intently into them at every word they uttered. Searching for lies. Alarm bells rang the first time they offered you crudely-brewed coffee or let you hold their firearm for a minute. Relationships were never this complicated, but there was so much (or little) to lose then. It wasn't even the fear they would kill you, some nights were spent quietly begging for it, but that they could leave you lost, naked and alone to a far worse fate.

Bonds not forged over long stretches were made through far quicker, nastier and brutal bouts of survival. Their steadfastness when overwhelmed, ignoring that most basic of ideas; I'd only have to outrun you. Military personnel fared best in the early days with those bonds already in place. Time though, was forever the great divider and decider.

Company kept you warmer than any blood-speckled tarp. Nothing eased throbbing ankles like honest, hearty laughter. Those people heavy with empathy and sympathy could lead the happiest lives but often found themselves the most vulnerable. The world was the same as ever, people the same as ever. We had just been distilled, boiled down to our base instincts and characteristics. Kindness and ruthlessness forced into constant loggerheads, each needed for a worthwhile survival in different ways. Existing separately and in queer, contorted mixtures - mercy killing, that most extreme of oxymorons. More than anything on those cold nights, more than the Runners and the Clickers and gangs of Hunters, you feared what would be left of you if you didn't wake up at all. What impact had you made? Worth your share of what little time was left for all of humanity? Spent it doing something other than grasping for more precious seconds.

Maybe you leave behind a kid, the result of some lapse in concentration - who would knowingly bring a life into such eternal hardship? Or some other substitute for a child you always stopped yourself from creating, a companion sufficiently younger to fill that gap. Imparted wisdom to them in the hope that they might do better than you, be better. Help them find that balance between surviving and something worth surviving for. Tell them tales of life before and how it might be again, stories built of truths they didn't believe or lies they wanted to. Stories were one thing worth holding onto, scrawled onto walls and scraps, passed on by anybody to anybody. Living on long after you were gone, so long as there were mouths to repeat them.

A good tale was worth a lot. Could scrounge you a meal, shelter for the night or evoke the sort of dry laughter that could get a gun out of your face. Worth collecting, storing and sharing to those you reckon might have an ear for them. As long as they had some truth - though not necessarily a true story - some message or lesson that might resonate later. Family, horror, loss, humour or mostly just something to pass the time was enough. Soldiers with tales of empty heroism. A man speaking of his lost family. An old woman sharing her knack for survival. All were tinged with regret and hardship, an inevitable given.

The very best stories were probably never told, locked behind the teeth of every corpse the Infected left behind. Maybe that Clicker had a tale that could make your wet yourself with laughter? Smash open the head and have a look, an old joke spread over the nation in those twenty years. Maybe the best ones deserve to be shared.


	2. He's Worth Remembering

The vending machine was dry but for the shards of its plastic front and could only have mocked him more if the metal coils had been slowly revolving with empty promise. Offices were next to worthless as far as food was concerned but other supplies were sometimes in abundance - things often overlooked by others. A thrifty scavenger could use staples and paperclips, even post-its were in high demand within small encampments where passive-aggressive reminders were the eyes of big brother. In this case, the locked door the supply closet was undermined by the collapsed plaster wall around to its right and he was able to pull himself through between two shelves, knocking over split and leaked printer cartridges in the process. He had hit a rich vein of supplies, useless to most but a grin appeared when he saw what would make the next few weeks easier to bear.

The boy had waited, as told, down in the building's lobby and was rearranging the bowels of his backpack when the man reappeared huffing and wheezing from the stairs. He did this often, checking and re-checking the arrangement and order of items. Prioritize. his father had taught him. He did his best, but under the spare shoes, blankets, tins and the knife he shuddered to so much as touch was the collection of paper. The whole thing double-wrapped in plastic grocery bags and resting on a piece of thick card to keep it all square; page after page, scrap after scrap of scribblings and scrawlings. He was well aware of the ever-present damp in most buildings and packed the most important of his possessions accordingly. The lobby had once been grand but the marble façade was giving way to the unstoppable creep of undergrowth.

"You find anything?" the boy was eagerly to his feet and swung the pack on his shoulders, "I'm all out now."

The man checked the haul, "Now if you hadn' been such a damn fool we'd still have pen'n'paper to make a list of what I jus' foun' up there." The boy said nothing and there followed the list that would not be written, "I gots some tape, full roll by the looks an' some superglue which is good for deep cuts. Paperclips for you-" a small box of thin card rattled as it was tossed and caught, "-to keep things organised. An' a few dozen batteries o' different sizes to sort through but I think they's all shot."

"That it?"

"Excuse me?" And the tone forced the boy to shrink back into himself and stare down at the tape around the toes of his boots.

"I mean," muttered into his chest before looking back up, "Did you find anything else, Dad?"

"Now I maybe did but I don' think you deserve it. You all squared away? Ready to move?"

An emphatic nod in return, hands read on the shoulder straps, "Just like you told me; at the drop of a hat."

"So maybe I foun' a full pad o' paper. An' maybe it's still in plastic an' dry an' white," the boy's face illuminated by his father's words, "An' maybe I actually give you it if we get some damn miles humped o'er today. Right?"

"Right."

"Good boy."

Twenty miles, by the father's reckoning, the two made that day. More than planned and though proud the man played the accomplishment down, "Well, I guess you almost earned it. Besides I can't be doin' with humpin' the extra weight aroun'." He held out the pad with one hand like it didn't matter and the boy took it with quiet reverence, not a more precious thing in the world in that moment. Ran his fingers over the plastic as though learning something from the mere feeling.

The man was taken back to times before everything rotted to pieces and realised he didn't know his own son's birthday. Memories of ripping open last-minute gifts with entitled glee and tossing the contents within minutes in favour of the next gaudy shredding. His son though did no such thing and instead, after quietly sitting and turning it over a few times, carefully opened the writing pad's sheathe so as to keep it intact. Recognised the worth of it, the importance of plastic's power against damp and its use. The boy had no notion of disposability.

And into the hours of twilight, until his eyes strained and winced, the boy wrote with the fervor of a dam releasing a backlog of floodwater. He asked his father for a fire to continue though he knew the request was in vain; they camped that evening amongst a boulder formation exposed upon a low hillside, invisible against the rock. A fire would have given them away for miles around. And what the boy wrote the father never knew, deeply secretive of every scrap and word, and eventually learned not to bother asking. Easier simply to nurture the boy's desire with books and any writing supplies he could scavenge whilst at the same time pretending to disapprove. All he knew for certain was how serene his son was when lost in the connection between pen and paper, the furrowed brow between paragraphs and pages. The irritability when the paper was full and all he could do was forever rearrange and re-read.

Where had it come from? One thing that the boy had not taken from the father. Stirred in him by the stories told by loners they would briefly travel with? Some gut yearning from learning to read and write in the quarantine zone? It separated them in a way that upset him sometimes, a secret part of his own son he wasn't allowed to see or able to understand. School had been a time of strife for his own childhood, couldn't remember a single word he had read for the pleasure of it. And though he wished his son spent more time on the practicalities of survival, the foraging and rationing and hunting and scouting, he never pulled him away from writing to do so.

It brought a peace to them both in the evenings and mornings before they would set out to bring more pain to their feet. But as time wore on, the more the father would worry that his son was not ready for a life of survival without him. That if the worst were to happen and the boy found himself alone he would simply sit down and lose himself to the page until the bony fingers of death found him too. The stars that night bore witness to the father's secret tears and the sudden jerk to waking was the next thing he knew, away from horrors the brain only broached when the eyes were closed.

The boy was already awake, the mornings a gift to him for one more reason than to his father. Scribbling stopped at the rousing, "You were muttering about mother. I wish I could remember her." And the man kept the instant reply behind tightly shut lips. He gave the boy another undisturbed half hour of writing before setting out again. Up and over the hill into the bright sun, to the east. Always east.

Woodland denser after so much time untended, slower going but better cover. A chance to teach the boy about weighing up your options. Worth the scratches from branches to stay out of sight. Easier too to get away from Infected among the trees, blind desire for flesh leading them into tangled brush and endless stumbling. An easy atmosphere between the two, the trees holding back hardship and death, even squeezed out a laugh or two. A smile from his son enough to keep back hunger and pain and then- something, a noise or presence. A tickle in the father's spine the humans had long forgotten how to process properly. The boy kept walking unaware and a fast whisper, loud as the man dared, stopped him in his tracks. He didn't turn around, some small act of mercy from fate itself.

The boy's head came away in several pieces suspended with slick red. Relative movement of solid and liquid a like, arcing toward the ground littered with pine needles. Inertia of the neck took the force and the body fell more slowly than the mess of skull and brain. Small mercy not to have to see the face, whatever remained. The sound came after, almost two seconds, from some range. And all the pain and strife came back to the man in a wave. The all-encompassing weariness returned to him from the boots upward, like the ground willed him to his knees. Too tired to even crawl over to the corpse- no, the bag. All that remained of his son now was in the bag, on all those pages, worth more now than ever. Carefully wrapped and preserved. Taught him well.

"Last time I waste bullets teachin' you to fuckin' shoot," the hunter spat, "Guy was on his knees, still takes you three shots. Second through his leg, see?" A boot kicked at the wound, "Unnecessary sufferin'. At least the kid didn't feel nothing."

"Sorry."

"No more shootin' for you for a while, don't deserve it for that sloppy-ass shit. Check the kid's bag, you've earned yourself the messy work."

"Sorry," the younger hunter wiped his mouth on a sleeve and knelt over the boy's fresh corpse and bag.

The other muttered, "Oh sure, sorry. Like fuckin' band-aid to you. I is sorry. Won't happen again. Sorry. Dropped the food. Can't start a fire. Lost the map. Shoulda just shot your ass and started over fresh with the kid o'er there."

And the sloppy hunter found the boy's most secret thoughts and fears, the things he found most important to him and worth capturing and noting, "Shit, they were father and son. We shoulda just left 'em be. Kid's written nothing but stuff about his Dad, page after page. Stories of him fighting off runners and how he used to be a soldier. 'Bout how he taught him to start a fire, lists of berries and edible plants. Kid was learning.

"All you's doin' is makin' me regret not shootin' you instead. Anythin' useful in there?"

"Bro, this stuff is useful."

"Dammit boy, spent too long gettin' your nose outta them fuckin' books and your ass out here in the woods to just pick up more fuckin' readin' material from our first kill. Leave that shit behind, take the blankets I can see in there and let's get goin'."

The younger brother made sure to return the writings and pages to their protective covers and bags, set square once more with the piece of card. Only one scrap he kept, folded neatly in his back pocket. Best as he could make out the first thing the boy had written in the collection: "To whoever finds this. I want you to know about my Dad. Everything I will ever do and be is because of him."


	3. A Couple of Extras

**First thing, thanks to everyone who favourited, reviewed, followed and just plain _read_ the first two chapters. I very much hate writing actual canon characters because I don't like to pretend I know them as well as those who originally wrote them, and I appreciate anybody who takes the time to look over something that heavily involves original characters. Anyway, this chapter is a collection of few little things I couldn't expand into a few thousand words. I liked them enough though that I couldn't just leave them scrawled away in a notebook. Again, thanks. I plan to approach the actual game in the same way, have a bunch of people talking of what they know about Joel and Ellie. Lies and rumours and exaggerations. I've started it but I want to do it right, so it'll be a few chapters away.**

* * *

Once he got outside of the perimeter, so the story goes, he removed all his clothing and just ran into a building known to be infested with all kinds of fungal-based horror. Screaming something only he could understand, if anybody could at all and the two on watch that bright morning just allowed him to do it. Hunters were just people, easy to forget as it was with the way they treated others. And things could get too much for them same as they could for anybody else. It wasn't a life that all of them chose, some had it forced upon them through peer-pressure and plain, horrifying necessity. There were those hardened few, of course, who took to the hunter's life the second they first heard of spores turning people deranged. But the vast majority were warped and worn down over time to live off the misery of those unfortunate enough to wander into their web. Suicides were inevitable and some were more inventive than others. In this case, he wanted to be infected. Maybe he thought one day he might slip back into camp and kill them all.

He folded his belongings neatly and left his boots on top, saying to the pair of watchmen, "They got more soul than I do now, your feet's the same size then they's yours." He ran off and the other two just rolled their eyes at his pseudo-philosophy. Ran like a man with the weight of the world lifted from his shoulders, arms straight out to the sides like the wings of a plane, free and ready for Death's embrace. He returned sheepishly some half hour later, presumably having checked the building top to bottom for clickers and runners, breathing in heavily from anything he thought resembled a spore. He said nothing as he dressed himself and the watchmen were just as silent until he had tied his boots and looked searchingly at them.

"Yeah, they cleared that place out last week, clean as a whistle now. Even opened the windows all up to let out the spores."

"Coulda fuckin' said sum'tin."

"Dunno, seemed like you needed to let off some steam. Go get yourself a brew."

* * *

He would give take any books you found off your hands in return for cigarettes, few had the reference to know how dry and stale they had become, for many it was just something to do with your hands besides strangling someone. He seemed to have an endless supply and would slowly reduce the prize for a new piece of literature until they were only getting a single smoke. Nurse them between filthy fingernails, light it and barely even take draws to make it last, just breathe in the fumes from its self-exhaustion. Only after they lost the initial glee of running the length of it under their nose, inhaling deeply.

Until eventually he had three quarters of some forty Hunters clamouring for every rotten scrap of a story they found. Books became their own currency and when found were hidden on the person if sure they hadn't been spotted. Some almost forgot about food, bullets and other supplies, risked otherwise worthless encounters with clickers for something they tossed to one side before his way into their midst. A fight broke out over a copy of Moby Dick and guns were drawn. Two men between them managed to bring in a whole Encyclopedia Brittanica, seventeen leather-bound volumes, over three trips out through a spore-infected country house. By then they were only getting a single cigarette per spine and the two fell out over what to do with the seventeenth, never spoke again.

One day he stopped giving them out at all. Maybe he ran out, maybe he had enough to read but he just stopped dead and didn't respond to any bargain, plea or threat. One by one, they most desperate would visit him. Ask him where he found all the smokes and where he hid them. He took up two rooms in a hotel, one he lived in and the other had slowly turned into a library. Crude bookshelves heaved and creaked. Meatheads would bust in while was reading and demand to know. More than once both rooms were trashed and searched and he would spent day replacing floorboards. He was 'randomly' chosen for increasing numbers of patrols as the whole town was searched top to bottom for the precious nicotine.

It all came to head when he returned from another fruitless patrol to find his literary collection piles high at a crossroads in the centre of town - a few hundred classics and not so memorable pieces of pulp. He was given one last chance but didn't say a word and at sun-down there was an impromptu bonfire that all were forced to attend. The pages twisted and curled to ember, charcoal and ash was all that remained. The following morning all had to clean up the dozens of infected brought into town by the fire and cheers. And then the Librarian, as they would jokingly call him from then on, bid his time.

He waited until people had forgotten, until hunger set back in for food and medical supplies, until a request from him for a chat was as boring as waking up to another grey day. The ash from the bonfire long washed and blown away, only the scorch mark remained on the tarmac. He chose ten, some old and some young but all ex-smokers to varying degrees of desperation. And between them he discretely shared ten thousand cigarettes, the remainder of his long secret stash. Working out at around fifty packs a piece, hidden in tatty plastic bags. And he sat back as the town of Hunters slowly collapsed in on itself through murder and extortion and addiction.

They never knew where he had hidden them or what had originally planned to do with the rest after he stopped buying books with them and they destroyed his collection. Those thoughts and motivations were spilled out over the floor with a baseball bat by a smoker certain that he was _still_ holding out on them. And when those next travelers cautiously entered town, they thought the scorch mark was from a petrol bomb, the murders a blood coup and the suicides from fear of infection. When the truth was everyone in the town perished trying to claw back a piece of their old life.

* * *

"Group leaves town with ten people, six/four split between men and women. I dunno, maybe a place gets overrun and they - look, shit, don't matter _why_ they went. Right, so there's this one guy who takes charge. He's got the gun and the fucking balls I guess. And they set out and they make good going at first. Course the inevitable happens and they happen on some infected.

"So the guy does something so brutal that you just couldn't think of it in any other situation. Now, how he chooses I dunno. Oldest first? Youngest? Vote? Straws? Alphabetical? Don't even know if everyone even agreed to it but you know how_ real_ quiet people get when it comes to how and who survives. So one gets chosen and hell - I smile now to even think of the _simplicity_ of it - he takes a knife and he just nicks the Achilles tendon on one ankle. The rest run and the abandoned just hobbles and hollers in pain until the infected get him. For all I know he let you choose which leg. And the group survives and moves on, the needs of the many.

"But encounter after encounter, the many starts to look a lot more like the few. A string of sliced tendons behind them. But still they go along with it because it ain't _them_ being left behind, you know? So you're thinking what happens when there's just two of them? Just him and one other. Never find out because the two make it somewhere, some town or something. They survive and decide whether to pass on what happened or just forget it all together. Is it something worth sharing?"

And you ask him because in the deepest part of your gut, that part of your brain where the dark thoughts go, that look in his eye tells you how he knows this tale. You fear what it might mean for you if he were to come clean and admit it to you. Just to you, you swear you won't tell a soul. All you have to do is ask him how he was able to slice and leave for dead people he knew before. And he's waiting because he knows you want to ask, got that killer punchline that makes the telling all the worthwhile. So you ask him how he knows the story and how he can live with himself.

And he just laughs at you, long and hard, but doesn't say another word and leaves you where you sit. Transfixed and desperate to hear how awful a human being he is. You see the walking stick then and how his body has learned not to put any weight on one leg and you realise. Realise that he holds onto a different story, a better story. But you weren't worth telling it to.


	4. Boys in the Wood - Part 1

"Who does this man think he is? He wants to take our kids out there with him, does he even know what's out there?" an older townsperson spoke out, "I'm against it. Things are working out just fine as they are, we're living just fine." There were murmurs in the church's long hall, faces cut up by the shadows of vines on the tall windows - left to promote the facade of an abandoned settlement - the more vocal were in agreement. Most were quiet.

Another stood to say her piece, middle-aged and with the same tired exterior that most carried under their eyes, matting down the front of her dress, long since seen its Sunday best, "Mister- sorry, Captain Gilchrist. None of us here aren't grateful for what you've done-" half the congregation nodding sagely, the rest refusing to make eye contact with anybody else, "-in the two years you've been with us. Many owe you more than we can express, my own boy wouldn't be here if, well, that's in the past." Two runners, two bullets. A hand moved from dress to the messy, sloppily-trimmed head of her teenage son. He stood to speak but was held firmly down by her palm. "But I cannot condone what you suggest and continue to each time we hold these meetings. We came out here to escape such things. We wanted a peaceful life, enriching to the soul."

The fifty-strong congregation, near everyone who called several of the town's rotten, swollen buildings home, murmured in the pews. Splintered into tangents and other conversations. The mayor, their leader had been nodding to the nay-sayers out of sight of the captain himself. He had been a reverend and led what remained of his flock out into the Nebraskan hills, away from the murder and infection into the light and space. He called for order and quiet, arms aloft with palms open upward to the heavens. A voice that carried a kind of calm that comes only from knowing the outcome of a given conflict. "My people, please. Please. We shall put it to the usual vote after hearing from Captain Gilchrist. Who, need I remind you, has graciously listened to each of you in turn."

Gilchrist nodded to the mayor as he took the pulpit, early forties but the grey hair made him appear older. Youth sucked from his eyes long ago, no spark and everything in him seemed to exist below the surface. That's not to say there was not some shell he kept on for them, some shadow of the person he was before when he could talk and laugh about things other than death. There were hundreds of men like him, lean skeletons draped in what remained of army uniforms of stitching and patches. Men as rusty in how they were with others as the weapons they carried out of some muscle memory. How he had to fight with those pilgrims to be allowed to carry it with him as he pleased in their peaceful utopia.

He spoke with a surprise eloquence and bluntness that was always respected even if not agreed with. "Thank you, John. Now I don't know what else to say to you good folks that I haven't the last six times," Gilchrist scratched his cheek with the back of one thumb, "This group needs protecting, it is growing and people are seeking you out for refuge. We have four new faces since the last time we voted on this. Which means people are hearing about us. Only a matter of time before less than savoury sorts come-a-calling-"

"Then we will hide from them," a meek, bald man stooped to his feet and looked around for approval, "We have done it before, in the basements and cellars."

The mayor stood to intervene but Gilchrist put out a hand, "S'okay John. Yes we can hide for now. Hiding twenty people people was easy, thirty too. But we are already strained to hide our current numbers. So of course we could, but keep allowing every sob story into this place as you have been and eventually we'll need to decide who to leave out of the cellars when prowlers come searching. Whatever way we look at the future of this place, and you people have really got something good here, difficult choices are going to need to be made. So let me spell it out to you again; I propose a small, armed militia to patrol the perimeter of your fine town. Led by and maintained by my good self. Answerable, of course, to John and all of you. I have volunteers already, some vocal and others who have expressed the desire in private." Suspicion looked side-to-side between itself, searching for secret wants in peering eyes. They all waited for more but the captain was done and returned to his creaky, wooden chair, he already knew the outcome.

They voted, a show of hands, fifty-two against and five for. The instance before there were only three and the following yielded ten, each few months the number voting for increased. Gilchrist managed to persuade the mayor to enforce anonymous voting and those afraid of being seen to vote for the measure were allowed to answer out of the watchful gaze of the god-fearers who held social court in the church's hall. This measure brought the vote to near even, but with those against still holding sway.

It took horror and loss for the voting to switch sides, easy to vote against when things are going well. You hear the growling and scratching but until you open the door and see the wolf you can pretend it isn't there. Gilchrist was blamed naturally, for the tragic event. Where were you? How did you let this happen? We were supposed to know if one got so close. Now look what you've allowed to happen. The captain didn't care what any of them thought, only the son. And at the hastily brought together meeting - that borderline descended into a trial - the teenager who witnessed it all had his say. "The captain was asleep when the clicker caught my father in our backyard, as almost all of us were. I can't blame him without blaming everyone."

Flash memories of his father from the upstairs window, the yard bathed in soft lunar light, on the ground with it and struggling. Never had a man seemed so strong and weak at once. Moonlight turned blood black, crude ran down his father's shirt and burst forth from the clicker's head with each animalistic crash of the clenched fists. Skin tears and lacerations from each frantic hammer fall, the creature eventually went lip though noises from its throat took two more strikes and the snap of a finger. He stood from straddling the corpse and stared at his broken hands, bone shining through the skin turned midnight. Sucked down the cold air, blood steamed from him and movement in the window attracted his gaze. Did he smile and wink or just wince in agony?

A trail of black on grass was all that remained when Gilchrist got there, breathless and frantically searching down the sights out into the murk. "He left me, my own father, he just ran without a word and I felt so abandoned at first. He always voted for the captain's proposal, even back when there was only two votes for it including Gilchrist's and you all whispered and gossiped and discussed making us leave. He wanted to protect us and our life here and thanks to rest of you he was only able to do so in death. Had he not ran, many of us might not have seen today. I don't blame the captain but I do blame all of you."

And the vote passed.

And the town flourished, grew and expanded without fear. Without having to hide their existence, crops could be cultivated and food was never short. Days could be spent outside, wood chopped for fires and cookers. Livestock were found wild and brought back, fattened and slaughtered if no mate was found in time. Those who did not patrol out in the surrounding woodland and hills were able to resort to their old past-times. Never waking and wondering if it were the last; reading, writing, teaching. The people in that small, peaceful Nebraska settlement really _lived _again. Not the way they used to by any means but in a way that approached paradise compared to the facism of quarantine zones or savagery of hunter-controlled cities. They began to imagine a future, secretly at first, only in their minds. But soon whispered such ideas to people they could trust before eventually sharing them in discussion. A future instead of clinging desperately to the past.

The militia, those young men who followed Gilchrist out into woods for increasing periods of time came back a little older, wiser and often with goods and wares scrounged and found. Praised by the townfolk for their sacrifice, giving up the chance to live to way that the rest did. The mayor announced quiet celebrations in their honour, deemed them heroes and gave the initial seven freedom of the town. In the year following the vote, the town did flourish and bloom. The population more than doubled and several new lives were brought into the world through love and not absentminded lust. Dissent remained. The safety and security allowed people the time to develop concerns and complaints. There are too many now. I don't want to share my town with their kind. They're not even married. And the rest would smile knowingly at them, happy that the biggest concerns being brought up were merely social ones. Food plentiful after a somewhat sparse winter.

Few could doubt that Gilchrist and his band of teens and young men had saved their little piece of heaven. Just as one of their number's father had that year before, sensing the change and knowing what would happen had he stayed. So too they felt something in themselves that did not sit with the god-fearing and easy-going existence of their neighbours. They changed too and soon found themselves markedly different from people in the town, others from the population's influx joined them out in the woods and hills. Yes, the town flourished and anybody who left after that year would tell you of the bliss and tranquility of the place.

But after that, you would hear no tales. After that first year the people no longer left, no new arrivals to the settlement. No travel at all. The boys in the woods made sure of that.


End file.
